Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."

Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them.

This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice. "While this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have only been a handful of campaigns in recent years," the researchers wrote. "The combination of targeting Junos OS routers that serve as a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory only agent, makes this an interesting confluence of tradecraft worthy of further observation." The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 (PDF) highlights misinformation as the top global risk due to generative AI tools and state-sponsored campaigns undermining democratic systems, while cyberespionage ranks as a persistent threat with inadequate cyber resilience, especially among small organizations. From a report: The manipulation of information through gen AI and state-sponsored campaigns is disrupting democratic systems and undermining public trust in critical institutions. Efforts to combat this risk have a "formidable opponent" in gen AI-created false or misleading content that can be produced and distributed at scale, the report warned. Misinformation campaigns in the form of deepfakes, synthetic voice recordings or fabricated news stories are now a leading mechanism for foreign entities to influence "voter intentions, sow doubt among the general public about what is happening in conflict zones, or tarnish the image of products or services from another country." This is especially acute in India, Germany, Brazil and the United States.

Concern remains especially high following a year of the so-called "super elections," which saw heightened state-sponsored campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion. But while it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish AI-generated fake content from human-generated one, AI technologies, in itself, is low in WEF's risk ranking. In fact, it has declined in the two-year outlook, from 29 in last year's report to 31 this year.

Cyberespionage and warfare continue to be a reason for unease for most organizations, ranked fifth in the global risk landscape. According to the report, one in three CEOs cited cyberespionage and intellectual property theft as their top concerns in 2024. Seventy-one percent of chief risk officers say cyber risk and criminal activity such as money laundering and cybercrime could severely impact their organizations, while 45% of cyber leaders are concerned about disruption of operations and business processes, according to WEF's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report. The rising likelihood of threat actor activity and sophisticated technological disruption is listed as immediate concerns among security leaders.

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that "sets a federal agenda meant to move U.S. digital assets businesses into friendly oversight," reports CoinDesk. The order creates a cryptocurrency working group tasked with proposing a new regulatory framework for digital assets. It will be "made up of the Treasury secretary, attorney general and chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, along with other agency heads," notes Reuters.

The directive also explores the creation of a "national digital asset stockpile," orders protections for banking services for crypto companies, and bans the creation of central bank digital currencies which could compete with existing cryptocurrencies.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders, writing in a post: Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond "I don't know" to calculus-related questions. To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models -- particularly LLMs -- make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats. And AI mistakes aren't accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong -- and obviously so, to a human -- as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it's not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won't forget what money is.

[...] Humans may occasionally make seemingly random, incomprehensible, and inconsistent mistakes, but such occurrences are rare and often indicative of more serious problems. We also tend not to put people exhibiting these behaviors in decision-making positions. Likewise, we should confine AI decision-making systems to applications that suit their actual abilities -- while keeping the potential ramifications of their mistakes firmly in mind.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: E-commerce giant Amazon.com is exiting its operations in the Canadian province of Quebec, leading to the loss of about 1,700 full-time jobs, the company said on Wednesday, prompting Ottawa to express its unhappiness. The online retailer will phase out operations across seven sites in the province -- the only location in Canada with unionized Amazon employees -- over the next two months. It will return to a third-party delivery model, relying on local small businesses, similar to its approach before 2020. "Following a recent review of our Quebec operations, we've seen that returning to a third-party delivery model ... will allow us to provide even more savings to our customers," Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said. The move will affect approximately 250 seasonal workers. Amazon will offer affected employees a package including up to 14 weeks' pay and "transitional benefits such as job placement resources," Agrait added.

"This is not the way business is done in Canada," said Federal Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

"There is no doubt that the closings announced today are part of an anti-union campaign against CSN and Amazon employees," said CSN president Caroline Senneville in a statement. "This move contradicts the provisions of the Quebec Labour Code, which we will strongly oppose," Senneville added.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Wednesday that current business leaders may be the last generation to manage an exclusively human workforce, as AI transforms the workplace. "We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," he told Axios.

His company's Agentforce platform, launched in September, has taken over many customer support tasks, prompting plans to move support staff into sales roles. Speaking to Axios at the World Economic Forum, Benioff dismissed Microsoft's AI CoPilot as disappointing and promised to defend his employees against discrimination amid political debates over corporate diversity programs.

Netflix will raise prices on most U.S. and Canadian subscription tiers after adding a record 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing its global total to 302 million users.

The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.

Alphabet's Google is backing AI developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI. From a report: The new funding comes in addition to more than $2 billion that Google has already invested in Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Google has a business agreement with Anthropic that covers the use of a suite of online tools and services.

Amazon counts among its biggest backers. San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI. The new deal comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value the startup at $60 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: If it wasn't already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon's ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon -- which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug -- but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I'm just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky's growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it's going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat. "This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk's X, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become," concludes Koebler. "It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms' relevance and importance doesn't necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."

Further reading: 'The Tech Oligarchy Arrives' (The Atlantic)

IMDb founder Col Needham is stepping down as CEO after 35 years, transitioning to executive chair. He will be succeeded by Nikki Santoro, who has served as the chief operating officer since 2021. TechCrunch reports: Santoro's appointment is significant, as she is the first woman to become the CEO and only the second person to hold the position. Needham founded IMDb in 1990 at the age of 23, steering the company into a powerhouse within the entertainment industry. After 35 years, he'll transition to a new role as executive chair.

According to Needham, Santoro's ascension is well deserved. [...] Santoro has been with the company since 2016, leading the company in expanding its database and improving its IMDbPro membership. She previously held leadership positions at Amazon, Microsoft, and The Weather Channel. "Nikki's strategic vision, deep understanding of our customers and products, and commitment to innovation have already delivered impressive business results during her tenure as COO," said Needham in a statement. "Her track record of driving growth and enhancing our products and services makes her the ideal person to guide IMDb into a new era."

EFishery, one of Indonesia's most prominent startups, may have inflated its revenue and profit over several years, according to an internal investigation triggered by a whistleblower's claim about the company's accounting. Bloomberg News: A preliminary, ongoing probe into the agritech startup, backed by investors including SoftBank and Temasek, estimates that management inflated revenue by almost $600 million in the nine months through September last year, according to a 52-page draft report circulated among investors and reviewed by Bloomberg News. That would mean more than 75% of the reported figures were fake, the report said.

EFishery, which deploys feeders to fish and shrimp farmers in Indonesia, was a darling of the nation's startup scene and scored a valuation of $1.4 billion when G42, an AI firm controlled by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, backed its latest funding round. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to modernize the country's fish industry, providing farmers with smart feeding devices as well as feed, and then buying their produce to sell into the broader market.

China broke its own record in installing renewable power in 2024, as the world's top polluter continues to push its energy transition while the US shifts away from fighting climate change. From a report: The world's second-largest economy added roughly 277 gigawatts of solar last year, surpassing the previous year's record of 217 gigawatts, the National Energy Administration said in a statement on Tuesday.

It also added nearly 80 gigawatts of wind, according to the statement. The record installation means China has hit its 2030 renewables target six years early. This stands in contrast to the US, the world's second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, where new President Donald Trump has started implementing a hard pivot back to fossil fuels and withdrawn from the Paris climate pact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The surge of interest in AI is creating a massive demand for computing power. Around the world, companies are trying to keep up with the vast amount of GPUs needed to power more and more advanced AI models. While GPUs are not the only option for running an AI model, they have become the hardware of choice due to their ability to efficiently handle multiple operations simultaneously -- a critical feature when developing deep learning models. But not every AI startup has the capital to invest in the huge numbers of GPUs now required to run a cutting-edge model. For some, it's a better deal to outsource it. This has led to the rise of a new business: GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS). In recent years, companies like Hyperbolic, Kinesis, Runpod, and Vast.ai have sprouted up to remotely offer their clients the needed processing power.

[...] Studies have shown that more than half of the existing GPUs are not in use at any given time. Whether we're talking personal computers or colossal server farms, a lot of processing capacity is under-utilized. What Kinesis does is identify idle compute -- both for GPUs and CPUs -- in servers worldwide and compile them into a single computing source for companies to use. Kinesis partners with universities, data centers, companies, and individuals who are willing to sell their unused computing power. Through a special software installed on their servers, Kinesis detects idle processing units, preps them, and offers them to their clients for temporary use. [...] The biggest advantage of GPUaaS is economical. By removing the need to purchase and maintain the physical infrastructure, it allows companies to avoid investing in servers and IT management, and to instead put their resources toward improving their own deep learning, large language, and large vision models. It also lets customers pay for the exact amount of GPUs they use, saving the costs of the inevitable idle compute that would come with their own servers. The report notes that GPUaaS is growing in profitability. "In 2023, the industry's market size was valued at US $3.23 billion; in 2024, it grew to $4.31 billion," reports IEEE. "It's expected to rise to $49.84 billion by 2032."

The notorious hacker IntelBroker claims to have stolen data from HPE systems, including source code, private repositories, digital certificates, and access to certain services. SecurityWeek reports: The compromised data allegedly includes source code for products such as Zerto and iLO, private GitHub repositories, digital certificates, Docker builds, and even some personal information that the hacker described as "old user PII for deliveries." IntelBroker is also offering access to some services used by HPE, including APIs, WePay, GitHub and GitLab. Contacted by SecurityWeek, HPE said it's aware of the breach claims and is conducting an investigation.

"HPE became aware on January 16 of claims being made by a group called IntelBroker that it was in possession of information belonging to HPE. HPE immediately activated our cyber response protocols, disabled related credentials, and launched an investigation to evaluate the validity of the claims," said HPE spokesperson Adam R. Bauer. "There is no operational impact to our business at this time, nor evidence that customer information is involved," Bauer added.

Hackers could steal sensitive personal data from former startup employees by exploiting abandoned company domains and Google login systems, security researcher Dylan Ayrey revealed at ShmooCon conference. The vulnerability particularly affects startups that relied on "Sign in with Google" features for their business software.

Ayrey, CEO of Truffle Security, demonstrated the flaw by purchasing one failed startup's domain and accessing ChatGPT, Slack, Notion, Zoom and an HR system containing Social Security numbers. His research found 116,000 website domains from failed tech startups currently available for sale. While Google offers preventive measures through its OAuth "sub-identifier" system, some providers avoid it due to reliability concerns - which Google disputes. The company initially dismissed Ayrey's finding as a fraud issue before reversing course and awarding him a $1,337 bounty. Google has since updated its documentation but hasn't implemented a technical fix, TechCrunch reports.

The European Commission intends to propose a ban on the use of PFAS, or "forever chemicals", in consumer products, with exemptions for essential industrial uses, the EU's environment chief told Reuters. From a report: PFAS, or Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, do not break down in the environment, raising concerns about the consequences of them building up in ecosystems, drinking water and the human body. They are used in thousands of items, from cosmetics and non-stick pans to aircraft and wind turbines, due to their resistance to extreme temperatures and corrosion.

"What we know we are looking for is a ban in consumer products," EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told Reuters in an interview. "This is something that is important for us human beings, of course, but also for the environment, but I think also for the industry so they know how they can phase out PFAS."

Amazon has angered its workers again "after forcing them to return to the office five days a week," reports the New York Post. The problem? "Not enough desks for everyone." (As well as "packed parking lots" that are turning some workers away.)

The Post cites interviews conducted with seven Amazon employees by Business Insider (which notes that in mid-December Amazon had already delayed full return-to-office at dozens of locations, sometimes until as late as May, because of office-capacity issues).

Here in mid-January, the Post writes, many returning-to-office workers still aren't happy: Some meeting rooms have not had enough chairs — and there also have not been enough meeting rooms for everyone, one worker told the publication... [S]imply reaching the office is a challenge in itself, according to the report. Some complained they were turned away from company parking lots that were full, while others griped about having to join meetings from the road due to excess traffic on their way to the office, according to the Slack messages. Once staffers conquer the challenges of reaching the office and finding a desk, some lamented the lack of in-person discussions since many of the meetings remain virtual, according to BI.
Amazon acknowledged they had offices that were "not quite ready" to "welcome everyone back a full five days a week," according to Post, though Amazon believed the number of not-quite-ready offices were "relatively small".

But the parking lot situation may continue. Business Insider says one employee from Amazon's Nashville office "said the wait time for a company parking pass was backed up for months." (Although another Nashville staffer said Amazon was handing out passes for them to take mass-transit for free, which they'd described as "incredibly generous.")

There's also Amazon shuttle busses, according to the article. Although other staffers "said they were denied a spot on Amazon shuttle buses because the vehicles were full..." Others said they just drove back home, while some staffers found street parking nearby, according to multiple Slack messages seen by Business Insider...

This month, some employees were still questioning the logic behind the policy. They said being in the office has had little effect on their work routine and has not generated much of a productivity gain. A considerable portion of their in-office work is still being done through video calls with customers who are elsewhere, these employees told BI. Many Amazon colleagues are at other office locations, so face-to-face meetings still don't happen very often, they added.
The Post adds another drawback of returning to the office. "Employees at Amazon's Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks."